The company is set to not only unveil a pair of smartphones during its just-announced Oct. 4 event in San Francisco, but we also may also see some other gear that will surely make it onto the holiday wish list of anyone that’s a fan of Google services.

The story behind the story: Late Monday, the company sent out a press invite and a playful tweet that takes you to a not-so-subtle teaser site. It’s clearly a phone and the URL of madeby.google.com tells us that instead of this being just another Nexus partnership, Google is more fully in control of its latest smartphones.

Goodbye Nexus, Hello Pixel

After a steady flow of rumors and leaks, we’re pretty confident that we’re going to see two smartphones, dubbed the Pixel and Pixel XL. Android Police captured some blurry images of two devices that match the rumor mill: 5-inch and 5.5-inch phones made by HTC.

The rotating images on the teaser site are a good hint there’ll be a focus on the camera’s photo capabilities. During last year’s unveiling of the Nexus 6P and 5X Google spent quite a bit of time favorably comparing the 6P’s low-light capabilities to the iPhone. It’s definitely something to keep your eye on.

Google Home

Google Home, featuring a purple base.

The first look at Google Home came at the company’s I/O conference in May. It’s essentially a Googly version of Amazon’s popular Echo, with an always-ready Google Assistant listening. This sounds like as good a time as any to show this off, which should finally include pricing, availability, and some more details about what the device can actually do.

A new tablet

We recently got a pretty solid rumor from Evan Blass about a Huawei-built, seven-inch tablet coming from Google. It’s not clear if this will also bear the Pixel name or how it will fit into Google’s new branding efforts. We’ve argued before that we’re long overdue for a stock Android tablet of this size, and we’re glad to see one may finally be coming.

4K Chromecast

Nothing new has popped up on this front, but we’re reasonably optimistic we’ll see a Chromecast capable of doing a 4K video. It makes a lot of sense for Google’s rather successful streaming stick to add this option with top providers like Netflix, and of course YouTube, now offering content in 4K. It sure would make for a nice stocking stuffer, if you’re into that sort of thing.

This story, "What to expect from Google's big Oct. 4 hardware event" was originally published by
Greenbot.

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